The Language of Trees (5 page)

He asked for five jars of the horseradish. It was the first thing he thought of to say.

Everyone thought Grant was just being helpful, running to the store on daily errands. The significance of his every thought grew with the anticipation of sharing it with her, a piece of driftwood that had sprouted a seedling, a fistful of lake glass the color of autumn leaves, an arrowhead still razor sharp as though it had just been fashioned. When Grant would
stutter trying to explain something, her hand on his shoulder eased his words. The first book he gave her was from a collection about the Appalachian mountain people. Together, they read about customs, remedies, and folkways, breathless at the timbre of each other's voice.

At each summer's beginning, he and Echo picked right up where they'd left off. One of the first things Echo shared with him was something she had read. That's when he knew.

She said she wanted to be like the trees, that she had read they were most trusting of all creatures because they put their roots down in one place, knowing they'd be there for their entire lives.

At the end of their first summer, when she said good-bye, he put his finger to her lips.

“We have no good-byes. We say,
Es'GönGëheit
. I'll see you again.”

His ancestors believed you'd always see again those people who meant something to you, whether in this life or the spirit world.

During their last summer, on the night before she left for college, they had picnicked on the top of Bare Hill. He had put off college for a year to be with her as much as possible. Joseph had let him work alongside her and sleep in a room in the back of the store. He and Echo had grown closer than ever.

That night the August heat made the crickets' wings slick with fervor. They had kissed for hours on the blue flannel blanket, when suddenly Echo pulled away. He had asked her what was wrong. He could see she was afraid, but she wiped the sweat from her forehead and pulled off her T-shirt. Topless, she stared at him. She unhooked the yellow cotton bra that held her small breasts, and let it fall off her shoulders. “We don't have to do this,” he said. But she moved toward him, trembling. She
unzipped his shorts, touched him, first gently, then harder. He reached up. Her breasts fit perfectly in his hands. He kissed her on the forehead. He told her again that they didn't have to do this, but this time, he persisted, his mouth tracing the freckles across her chest, down to her waist and then back up to her mouth as she knelt back onto the blanket and he pressed against her. He asked her if it was too soon, if she was ready to do this. “Think about it,” he told her.

“Stop thinking,” she answered. “Just don't think.”

He pulled her on top of him, and pushed himself into her for the first time, and he felt the force of his own energy as he never had before. As he entered her, her warm mouth coursed over his neck and he moaned, aching with the intense release, his lips parted slightly.

The grass scuttled in circles around their bodies, each blade a somber purple hue blurred in the haze of moon. In a moment the flood of emotion intoxicated him. As she hovered over him, he noticed the delicate curve of her neck, the soft tendrils of hair falling across her forehead, how her skin grew more flushed with each moment, as though she were drawing all the color out of the earth. He noticed these things with unusual clarity, the way a man notices something just before he loses it. “I think I might love you,” she whispered, blurting it out fast. It was the first time either of them had said those words. Grant couldn't speak. Not because he didn't feel the same. More, because the weight of that emotion was towering, and because of the promise ring that he had been carrying in his pocket, now hidden under a heap of clothing in the grass.

When he didn't respond, Echo looked away, hurt, as though she had been slapped. His silence had spoken volumes.

Quickly, she got up. She refused to look at him as she slipped her clothing on, gathered up her blanket and basket. Then she
took off running across the field. For a moment he didn't move, lying there, trying to make sense of it. When he finally caught up with her, she shrugged him off. “Tonight was a mistake,” she said, pulling the blanket around her body. “I lied. I don't really love you.” She waited for a reaction, tears forming in the corners of her eyes.

He stammered, grabbing for the ring. It was his mother's, though she never wore it—a gift that his father had carved from catlinite, a soft red stone flecked with tiny dots the Indians called stars. This stone contained a heart-line, a straight black hair-thick line that looked like a crack. It made the stone lucky for whoever wore it.

“You can't trust me, that's your problem,” she told him. “Because of what your mother thinks of me.” Echo had stared at Grant, daring him to leave her. She was drumming up as much meanness as she could muster, hatred even, he felt, as he looked into her red puffy eyes. Her tears dried an instant after they fell.

“Go ahead. I could care less. Hate me,” she ordered.

“I can't,” he said.

“What's wrong with you!” she cried. “We're not the same. I'm no good for you. Stop feeling sorry for me.” He watched her run home, the silvery grass splintering in her wake. He did not follow her.

The next day, Joseph drove her to the bus station, where she bought a ticket and left immediately for Cornell University.

Grant dialed her number that first week at least one hundred times. He could feel her breath on the line. He could picture her staring into her bedroom mirror as he once had seen her do, searching for the defect that she felt had relegated her to a lifetime of abandonment.

He knew the loss of her parents had walled up a part of her
heart, but he wasn't so different. He wanted to remind her of something they both wanted.

“We're like the trees. Remember?”

“No, you're like them,” Echo had said on the phone. “Not me.”

“If I were with you right now, I could change your mind. I could take a bus. I'll be there tomorrow.”

“Grant, I met someone. Please don't call me again. I won't ever love you,” she whispered. There was a tinge of fear in her voice almost as though she blamed him for making her say it. He hadn't talked to her since.

 

“W
HO CAN TELL HER
anything,” Joseph says, with a smile.

Grant may tell himself that it is just curiosity but both men know the truth. That just as there are some people you try to love but can't, there are those you can't stop loving no matter how hard you try. None of it has anything to do with logic.

Echo had always chided herself aloud for being too sensitive. She said that her eyes betrayed her, but this was the very thing that drew Grant to her. She could be listening to him, nodding, but her eyes would tell him she was thinking of other things. She was unable to mask anything. This had made her irresistible to him. It took him a long time to get over Echo. To move on.

Now his heart needs to settle. His fingers leave prints on the picture, but that is all he is willing to leave. He hands it back quickly. Grant manages to speak. “Duct tape?”

“Second aisle up on the left,” Joseph says, slipping the picture back into the wallet. “We'll be seeing more of you now. You know, boy, I always said you had some wisdom. Not a lot, don't go getting a big head.”

Grant stares at Joseph. “Well, you were sorely wrong, Joe.”

“Nah, look. I don't believe it,” Joseph replies. “One way or another we get a second chance.”

Joseph looks vulnerable, standing there, thin, brittle, with an ache behind his eyes. And Grant has seen that look before. Grant turns and starts to walk away. He knows that some people leave their mark on you forever. As much as a man tries, there will still come a day when he picks up the phone and dials a once forgotten number, or starts to follow someone who he thinks might be her, in the grocery store, in the street, at the park. He may look everywhere for a replacement. And even when he thinks he has found one, deep down he knows that it will never feel the same.

“Patience,” Joseph reminds him. “It takes a long time to become young.”

“Not sure what that means,” Grant says.

“You'll understand someday. All folks want to escape from their problems sometimes. Some try by praying all the time, thinking Spirit will take care of everything. But they can come to depend too much on this. The fact is that people right here on earth can do more for each other than the spirits can.”

At that moment, Grant looks to the right of the Feed & Grain at a flash of sunlight streaking across the grass, reflecting off the fur of an animal hiding between two bur oak. It is pawing at the grass and digging its nose into a pile of stones as though searching for the one hidden piece of moon that has fallen from the sky. Too big to be a coyote, probably a dog or maybe even a wolf, Grant guesses. Then, in a flash, it turns and runs, disappearing into the thicket across from the building.

“I thought there were no wolves left in Canandaigua,” Grant says to Joseph.

Joseph shakes his head. “There weren't for years. But I saw that big one for the first time this morning. Must mean something has changed.”

Grant tries not to look at the old man, whose eyes are burning into him. He tries for a clipped good-bye, but his voice catches. After weeks of silence, the words want to sit in his throat. Maybe he is too much like his father, incapable of dealing with emotion. Throughout his marriage, he had worked hard to appear in control, hardening at the first indication of crisis. And yet, in this place, he is too much like his mother, feeling too much and letting it bleed out of him. Neither of his parents seemed to have the key to dealing with emotion. They were at different extremes and instead of bringing them closer to the middle, it ended up polarizing them. Grant has spent his whole life ricocheting between the two. He rubs his neck and turns to go, eager to escape. The flies are starting to cloud the air.

As he walks off, he thinks about how a long time ago, in this very place, he found his voice. The memory is somehow reassuring. When he reaches the end of the road, Grant turns back to see Charlie Cooke resting his hand on Joseph's shoulder as the old man wipes his eyes.

B
Y NOON IN
C
ANANDAIGUA
, the air is already thick and feverish with the incessant beating of wings. Because the sight of the big sky has always made Echo O'Connell feel amazingly small, she can become so caught up by the earthen scent of lilacs mixed with smoldering red Canandaigua dirt that she'll drive all the way there with the top of her Jeep down, even as the wind spills her hair into tangles that will take three days to get out. She will be so intent on getting a glimpse of the sun spreading across the tinfoil lake that she won't even notice that she is going 85 mph and that she has missed the last three exits, having spent the last ten minutes caught up in the memory. The fact is, each May Echo can smell the lilacs in Canandaigua hours before she returns to the place. At any time of day, she will look up from her desk in Boston, so overcome by the scent of lilacs that she will have to roll up her sleeves and open the windows of her office. Right now Joseph doesn't know that the reason his adopted daughter is shivering as she speeds down Interstate 90 is not from the spiraling wind, but because of the sound of his cough two nights ago on the telephone. He doesn't know how often she remembers being dropped on his doorstep
at the age of six, or that the weight of her gratitude toward him often makes her shoulders ache. Gratitude can be a burden, after all. The burden is this: the world gave her Joseph, which means she owes the world for not abandoning her. She could have just as easily been lost forever. She is never too far from that fear, even now. All these years later, Joseph is everything to her; he is like the trees, rooting all those around him.

But owing the world such a debt makes her vulnerable. Who knows when the earth might want her to pay up? It might want to take Joseph back. She is never too far from this sense of vague panic.

Ahead, sunlight glimmers in streams across the interstate as the Jeep burns off the downy clouds that gather near the edges of the lake. Joseph handed her all those years ago as she stood in front of him, hungry and aching, a carrot and a Partridge family lunch box gripped in her hands. “Well, kiddo. I'm hungry,” he had said. “You like juneberry jelly sandwiches?”

Echo hadn't known whether to follow the social worker back into the cab, or to follow Joseph into the store. Her hunger made the decision for her. She had no idea what a juneberry sandwich was, but she liked how it sounded. As Echo helped Joseph slice bread and spread jelly, he said to call him Pop. She giggled.
Pop
was a funny word. It meant soda, she'd been taught. She thought she'd gone to heaven when he actually said she could try on all the jewelry he sold for the Seneca people who lived around here, and as she looked over it all, she had felt, for the first time, full, and wanting nothing. Not the silver bracelets and turquoise earrings, or the catlinite charms. She preferred, instead, to relish the feeling of being able to touch them all if she wanted. Joseph even told her she could choose one of the cornhusk dolls for her very own. Echo had taken a long time to choose her doll. Made with real animal hair, the
faceless dolls were meant to teach youngsters that vanity was undesirable. The summer tourists loved them.

“But where are her eyes?” Echo had said, distressed.

“She sees from the inside,” Joseph had explained.

“How did she learn it?” she had asked.

He had laughed. “She already knew. You do, too.”

The doll would help keep her safe, he said. When he told her that the sky had a present for her, she looked out the window, already used to the way he talked. She can still recall how the sun looked like a huge red poppy floating on the water. Her heart had felt just like that, as though it were a flower bursting with color. Her feelings about the world had changed in a few hours just as the sky had changed in a few moments.

He'd never agree that she owes him everything, but she does. He called himself next of kin when really he was only her mother's fifth or sixth cousin. Even then, Echo knew how close she had been to being abandoned. An Orphan. The word chases her still. It's the monster hiding under the bed, the shadow lurking behind the trees. Joseph always told her that she would never be alone, that her parents were up there protecting her. At night, she tested his theory, sitting in the window in her nightgown waving at the clouds as they tumbled across the sky. She imagined her parents were up there, two watchful spirits hovering over her, molding the clouds into shapes like clay, offering clues to her questions, abating her fears. She'd close her eyes and try to conjure every memory she could: her father pulling leaves from her mother's red hair as she was digging up flower bulbs; her mother dragging plywood and two-by-fours across the yard the day Echo's father built a tree house, and that lazy Tuesday afternoon that her mother had kept her home from kindergarten because of a cough, and had read to her for what seemed like hours and how that night, all three of
them had piled onto the big beanbag chair to watch the nightly news in the paneled den. Echo had watched her mother's tears fall across her freckled cheeks as the newscaster announced the death of Picasso, who had been her favorite artist.

When the memories didn't help, Echo would run and find Joseph on the porch. She'd crawl into his lap and fall asleep, comforted by the sound of his breathing, and the men's voices and the smell of their pipes. She loved their big stories and their deep laughter that sounded like wind and drums.

The fear of losing Joseph is never far from her mind, makes her want to try and stay awake for days as though she will lose track of him if she sleeps. Alone in her apartment, the impossibility of that big vague sky sweeps over her in an instant. It follows her into bed, and even the two cats lying on her stomach and perhaps a phone call to Joseph will not put her mind to rest. When the feeling is really bad and she is exhausted from nights of insomnia, she won't call, afraid she'll worry him with the sound of her voice. Only the cats know how she is shivering, trying to ground herself with her back pressed up against the wall.

She is lucky, she tells herself. It's not that she doesn't want to dwell on the loss of her parents. She simply can't. The kindest, gentlest man in the world raised her. In fact, out of all the places she could have landed, she had always thought she was the luckiest girl in the world, living above Joseph O'Connell's store.

She and the old man had made the apartment above the Feed & Grain into a cozy home. Thirsty for a drink? Right downstairs. Need an extra lightbulb? Back in a flash. She still feels her life was more extravagant here than anywhere else, even if her bedroom was never big enough for more than a cot, a lamp, and a bookshelf. She never needed much more than that.

From an early age, she had the responsibility of stocking and
reordering the paperbacks on the movable rack next to the fishing lures. She probably wouldn't have fallen in love with books if she hadn't worked there to earn her tuition for college. This is a deal she and Joseph had made. She knew from early on where she was going and why.

She can't lose Joseph. Not yet.

She doesn't want to come off preachy or desperate or condescending. He won't hear it. They both know stubbornness is a family trait, and neither was good at giving things up even though they could put on a convincing show. They have at least some of the same genes, after all. Even though his cough is horrible, he won't relinquish that pipe. Could she honestly say it was so easy letting go of Stephen? He's seven years her junior. They are worlds apart, but on certain topics like the impossibility of commitment, they meet perfectly. She didn't want to get married. At thirty-two, she paid no attention to a biological clock, and was in no rush to settle down. She told herself they were having the sort of fun most people wished for, and so it was all worthwhile. At least they were honest about what they were and weren't looking for, if not about the fact that he had broken the rules and had fallen in love with her.

The beginnings of crow's-feet shoot from the corners of her wide brown eyes. Often they redden and ache from reading for eight hours straight, but Stephen tells her she is beautiful. Still, there have been days, entire months, when she has looked into the mirror and another face has stared back at her, one that resembled an old sepia photo framed in Joseph's office, a photo of a woman whose face was raked by lines beginning at the eyes and continuing downward in large deep circles, curving around the nose, mouth, and chin. When Echo was younger she'd trace the lines in the face with her finger, thinking the face was beautiful. She was never concerned with things other
girls were, like perfect skin and brushing her hair fifty times on each side. Other things took up her mind: precious words, sculpted and balanced, and of course, the good health of the person she loves most in the world.

Now Echo's worn leather sandal catches the brake pedal as she slows for the tollbooth. She's trying to free herself from the seat belt, but her hair falls in her eyes and she can feel that she's holding up the entire line of cars behind her.

“Sorry, sorry,” she says, handing the ticket to the guy in the booth. Why is she still apologizing? She used to apologize for everything—a woman tripping over a crack in the street, the Xerox machine eating her boss's report, the rain on a Saturday afternoon.

“Seven seventy-five,” he says, craning out the window. “Like the Jeep.”

She's suddenly self-conscious, wondering if he is staring because he can tell she is not wearing a bra. She turns away, locates some change at the bottom of her purse and pays him quickly.

Flying down the interstate at 85 mph, the sound of the wind beating against her half-open window is deafening. She can feel every nuance of the road. It is almost like walking barefoot. She's lost in thought about how to broach the subject of health with Joseph, whether she has a right to ask that he go see a doctor, whether it's correct to suggest that he leave Canandaigua and come to live with her in Boston. Echo knows the help is there. People on the lake love him. But she worries. Loneliness often masquerades as independence. She can hear it seeping from the hollowness of his voice, through his words on the phone.

Still, can she fault him for not believing in conventional medicine? Fifty years of living alongside the Indians in Canan
daigua and watching the medicine of his old friend Two Bears, a famed Seneca healer, and before that, living among the Wataita people in Kenya, have taught him otherwise: that the greatest healer is the human spirit when it works in conjunction with the spirits of the earth: the plant spirits, the tree spirits, the spirits of the sky and moon, and the water spirits.

Joseph's beliefs reach into the deep forests of Africa. He had been studying to be a priest back then, organizing climbs up Mount Kilimanjaro. He had met his wife, Rose, during one of those climbs.

Echo thinks about their meeting far too often, and pictures the air so thick on a mountain that their footprints actually peeled off in the dirt.

Now with the dogwood tree unleashing its white petals into the air, she feels a tightening in her chest. If she didn't know better she'd say those were mayflies tumbling toward her.

If she squints hard enough, Echo can make out a blue flash of wings spreading across the wide bur oak. Despite the warm air, even while clamoring impatiently for the mayflies, certain kingfishers freeze in mid-flight, still holding an ancient memory of ice in their feathers.

Picking wildflowers, daisy and coltsfoot, can make certain feelings go away. She pulls over to the side of the road and gets out, stretching her long legs. Funny thing, she has finally embraced her body. Now that her breasts and hips are fuller and her stomach has softened, she likes her body more than ever. More so even than when she was ten years younger and fifteen pounds thinner. This is something she supposes a woman must learn over time. Who would have thought that as she got older, men would desire her more?

She scans the grassy slope. The tiger lilies are not in bloom, but there are purple thistle, chicory, and daisy, too, the blue
and white clusters reminiscent of the oil painting in her boss's office. When her boss announced the number of vacation days Echo had accrued, Echo was embarrassed that she'd gone five years without a real vacation. She'd taken weekends to visit Joseph, that was all. Where had the time gone? Wasn't she once a person who'd wanted things? It's not like she hadn't been busy. But busy didn't always mean happy. Perhaps she'd tricked herself—sometimes any movement felt like progress.

She whisks through the tall grass and she cuts across the muddy slope. Though she's still 50 miles from the lake, Echo already needs to reign in her emotions. She will gather flowers for Clarisse Mellon, her old friend and neighbor. She pours over Queen Anne's lace, gathering stems in her hands, searching for the one without its center, the one missing its purple regal spot in the middle of the white petals. Ahead in the distance, just as she pulls a few daisy stems carefully from the dirt, she sees something darting among the trees, a crouching shadow, slowly crawling toward her. She freezes, careful not to challenge it by looking directly in the eyes. Her heart is pounding. The wolf turns and disappears into the trees as thunder cracks the sky, and it begins to drizzle.

She quickly throws a handful of flowers into the backseat and starts the Jeep. The sky is fickle, turning dark as rain clouds move in. The wolf is nowhere in sight as she steps on the gas. Her goal is to surprise Joseph before sundown. Before long, she reaches the edge of town, and the new Walmart store with its discount down winter jackets out on the sidewalk rack. She drives down Main Street through Canandaigua, with its wide tree-lined streets and stately mansions. She passes the Pickering Monument, a granite boulder set on the courthouse lawn and inlaid with a bronze plaque to commemorate the last general council of the Iroquois and the Canandaigua Treaty
of 1794, one of the first treaties the United States entered into with the Indians, signed by George Washington, and which served as a proclamation of friendship and peace between the U.S. government and the Iroquois, a promise not to lay claim to, or disturb Indian lands. It is now a reminder of a promise unkept.